Joe and Jila's Melancholic Odyssey

Numbness was temporary. There was no doubt that his fingers would be full of pins and needles when they finally regained sensation, but for the moment the pain was absent. The world was absent.

Joe had not seen Jila in days. He knew she still existed, but he had lost all sense of her presence. His eyes were open, but it felt like he was staring at the void. He could only see one thing in his mind's eye: the colony. A colony on a planet orbiting a star which would soon die. A colony that needed to be evacuated before it was too late, a colony he could not leave until he found Jila again.

His last memory was of her disappearing into a dense forest with a bright blue hue on the horizon. At the time, he thought nothing of it; Mars had forests once, too. But as he stepped out of his shuttle he realized that this forest wasn't *normal*. This forest was vibrant and alive and ancient, like something out of a fairy tale. And then there was Jila, walking towards him with an expression that Joe couldn't read.

He remembered waving at her with an empty smile on his face. Something must have been wrong with her eyes because she looked back at him with a blank expression before turning away from him and running into the forest without looking back again. The trees seemed to close in behind her like hungry monsters closing in on their prey and Joe suddenly felt like he couldn't breathe any more.

At first he didn't understand what happened next; his breathing returned to normal and somehow his throat stopped hurting so much...but now it felt like his insides were melting away instead of just his skin! Clouds started gathering around him, even though there wasn't supposed to be any air in space to carry them around! And then there were voices everywhere telling him that perhaps this wasn't such a good idea after all! Voices telling him that they never should have come here! Voices telling him to run away! Voices telling him that this planet wasn't safe anymore! Voices telling him...that...this...was...a mistake!

When he woke up again - if this waking up could even be considered as such - there was no sky or anything else except for blackness everywhere. Somehow he knew that he'd been lying here for days or weeks or months or maybe years: time had no meaning here anymore either. It took him several hours before he started feeling pins and needles again, this time not just in his fingers but all over his body. He tried to move, but every muscle protested against being used again; moving hurt immensely and yet somehow it made him feel a little better at the same time as if every bone was slowly getting fixed piece by piece like a clockwork slowly being reassembled by an invisible hand inside him while its gears turned anew...but only after they were allowed to break apart again first, obviously; whether this process would take days or weeks or minutes remained to be seen.

Hours later Joe could sit up again and look around himself, blankly staring into infinity in front of himself while the void gazed right back at him through innumerable pinholes shining through space itself before falling onto his face like dust motes drifting down onto a sunbeam shone through a dirty window pane. The darkness swallowed everything whole while Joe absorbed light into himself like an oil lamp burning ever brighter within until all other sources were extinguished by its light alone and even space itself seemed to submit itself to its splendor as it fell deeper into eternal night in front of it like falling headlong into an abyss from which there would never be any return...until the light went out again and left only emptiness behind and all that was left behind was darkness once more and nothing more than that because darkness is everlasting and light is transient by nature, after all: what can you expect from something so ephemeral? Nothing but darkness for eternity...forever...forever...forever...until you wake up one day inside another light-filled room where you're staring down at your own chest which is full of tubes while your hands are holding someone else's hand whom you've never met before who is also looking down at you while tears are streaming down their cheeks...and no matter how hard you try you can't remember her name anymore because you've forgotten who she is already because all memories have already been taken away from you once-again just like how they were given back to you once-before when you'd already forgotten about them already because each individual memory is so fleeting...so transient...so ephemeral...like light itself after all which is why we don't miss it so much when it disappears finally behind us forevermore...forevermore...forevermore...forevermore!!